Is Trump Taking Roy Moore’s Disastrous Loss Too Well?

As the interminable New York Times needle swung for Doug Jones, handing a Democrat a Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama, the Republican establishment turned swiftly on former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who enthusiastically backed the pistol-toting theocrat Roy Moore over establishment candidate Luther Strange and, after reports emerged of Moore’s alleged past predilection for teenage girls, launched a scorched-earth media campaign to discredit his accusers. (Moore has denied wrongdoing.) Allies of Mitch McConnell, whom Bannon had hoped to subdue in part with a Moore victory, took the opportunity to unleash their pent-up frustrations with the self-proclaimed populist visionary. “What has been exposed here is that Steve Bannon has been the most harmful person to the Trump presidency in all of politics — Republican or Democrat,” Josh Holmes, a political adviser aligned with McConnell, told Politico, while Scott Reed, a strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, added that “Bannon hurt Trump by giving him poor advice.”

But while many Republicans took some small comfort in bashing Bannon, Trump, the nominal head of the party held his fire, offering a relatively gracious congratulations to Jones and appearing “in largely good spirits” on Wednesday. Moreover, he did not overtly blame Bannon for the defeat: While The Washington Postreported that Trump groused Bannon had sold him a “bill of goods,” aides told The New York Times that the two men spoke by phone for 15 minutes on Tuesday and so far, despite the urging of his allies in Washington, seems “disinclined” to banish his former chief strategist from his orbit.

There were, of course, plenty of people to blame for Moore: the talk-radio hosts who shilled for him, the president who endorsed him, the church leaders who condoned his sins, and the politicians in Washington who abandoned the people of Alabama to economic decline. Bannon, himself, spun the loss as a blow to McConnell and refused to back down. “Team Mitch did everything in their power to endanger our majority in the Senate and threaten the passage of the Trump agenda by ensuring the outcome that we saw last night,” Andy Surabian, a spokesman for Bannon, told Politico, accusing the Senate leader of gloating “about the fact that the Republican nominee in Alabama was defeated.” (Others blamed McConnell for shutting out their favored non-Moore populist in the G.O.P. primary, Mo Brooks.) “You have to grind it out,” Bannon himself said on Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show Wednesday. “This is going to be 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Every day. If we’re prepared to do it, we win.”

Moore’s candidacy had already primed the ground for an intraparty war. McConnell, along with a handful of prominent Republican lawmakers, disavowed the former judge shortly after the allegations against him were revealed, and the Senate Republican Campaign Committee pulled its support for Moore along with the Republican National Committee. But thanks to the president’s subsequent endorsement, the “insurgency” regained its foothold, and the R.N.C. quietly reinstated its operations in support of Moore. With both sides now claiming the high ground, the fissures exposed in Alabama are likely to deepen, presaging future chaos around midterm elections. ”If it wasn't for Mitch McConnell, there's a good chance Steve Bannon would have never gotten involved in this race at all,” Surabian told CNN, while McConnell had quietly told allies that he hoped to quash Bannon’s burgeoning political influence.

Such infighting is what ultimately led the president to back the wrong horse twice, losing first with the establishment Strange and second with the firebrand Moore. Even in deep-red Alabama, which Trump himself won by 28 points, Trump’s support was not enough to drum up support for the former, and it could not overcome the myriad hurdles that ultimately brought down the latter. Now, with his political capital spent and Democrats surging on multiple fronts, Trump is reportedly staving off creeping feelings of inadequacy and refusing to course-correct—a fact that bodes ill for the future of the G.O.P. “If you can figure out how to screw up a state as red as Alabama,” Holmes told CNN, “you can lose basically anywhere.”